Beilue: Tascosa grad to participate in 1960 Little League World Series reunion

American boys from the Berlin Command were the first team to represent Europe in the 1960 Little League World Series. Pat Williams of Amarillo is first row, third from right. A reunion is set for this weekend in Williamsport, Pa. (Courtesy photo).

American boys from the Berlin Command were part of the first Europe team to compete in the 1960 Little League World Series.Amarillo's Pat Williams, first row, far left, was the captain of the team. A reunion with seven players is scheduled for this weekend in Williamsport, Pa. (Courtesy photo)

Pat Williams ordered canes made for his old teammates, a group that hasn’t seen each other in 54 years. They are specially made ones, crafted from Louisville sluggers with their name on it as well as this: “1960 European champion, Berlin Command.”

Williams, 66, has had a knee replaced, so maybe some kind of cane is apropos. The others, all 66 as well, don’t have the spring in their step they did in 1960, but they will walk a little taller this weekend.

“We sound like a bunch of 12-year-old kids,” Williams said this week. “I was talking to one yesterday and he asked me if I was bringing a catcher’s mitt, that he wanted to throw to me one more time. We are at that point in our lives that the things we may not have appreciated for the longest time, we appreciate now.”

Williams, a 1965 Tascosa graduate, spent a career in Amarillo ISD — baseball coach at Caprock, principal at three schools, cluster director for Palo Duro and Caprock before retiring in 2008.

Before all that, before he came to Amarillo in 1961, Williams was a Little League baseball catcher, and good enough to be named a captain. His team was an all-star team taken from six teams from the Berlin Command, the large Army base in Germany that was surrounded by Communist Russia at the height of the Cold War.

These 14 players and three coaches won the European championships that year, significant in that for the first time, the Little League World Series expanded beyond the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

These American boys, all sons of fathers stationed in Berlin, were the first European representatives to play in Williamsport, Pa., one of eight teams to play in the famous tournament. They will gather again in the same place this weekend, seven of the players who lost contact with each other less than a month after the tournament ended in August 1960.

“We didn’t put any extra importance of when we played that we were the first team from Europe,” Williams said. “You pull up the history of the Little League World Series, and we’re there. You don’t comprehend that as a 12-year-old boy. It was terribly exciting just to be in that atmosphere — that’s all we knew.”

It was, as Williams remembers, a 30-day whirlwind in that summer of 1960. The Berlin Command rolled through the Germany and European championships, winning six games against other kids from American bases in Spain, Italy and England by a combined score of 72-15.

In the European final, excessive rain required an Army helicopter on the field and jet fuel to dry it out. Williams, whose father was Lt. Col. Wesley Williams, knew it was a big deal.

The next day, 14 boys and two coaches, both Army officers, were on a Pan American flight to New York. No parents, just those 16. In a much more sheltered world, Williams said they were all like kids in a candy store.

Those crew-cut boys became rock stars, doing airport interviews with the Stars and Stripes military newspaper and Armed Forces radio. They had stops at Coney Island, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the New York Times.

Holy cow, for the first time, they saw soft-served ice cream.

The banquet, the first-class treatment, the new uniforms, the immaculate fields and the crowds in the thousands, all of that made a guy swallow hard.

Williams was injured in a scrimmage and missed the first two games. In the single-elimination game, Europe lost to Mexico, 7-4, and then defeated Canada, 6-3, in the consolation round. Williams returned for the third game, a 7-2 loss to the Pacific region.

And just like that it was over. In the nomadic world of the Army, fathers were being deployed as soon as their sons returned to Berlin.

“That was the way of life, but an accepted way of life,” Williams said. “One of our coaches, Don Thompson, couldn’t go to Williamsport because his enlistment was about up. It broke his heart.”

William left Berlin in the spring of 1961 when his father was deployed to San Antonio. Soon, the Canyon native retired, moving the family to Amarillo.

Those jug-eared, crew-cut lads had not had any contact in more than half a century until about a year ago around 1 a.m. when Williams said he began to “piddle around on the Internet.” He googled “1960 Berlin baseball team” and it brought up a site, Berlin Brats.

With the help of a woman who ran the site, Williams began to locate long-ago players. A Charles Spannare was fairly easy to locate, the right Ralph Freeman, Ed Cole or Timothy Harrison, not so much.

But Williams kept plugging away, eventually contacting 13 of the 16. One had died. Nobody had previous contact with any player after the World Series.

A reunion is planned for this weekend, and seven players and a total party of 20 from across the country will reunite at Williamsport. When Little League officials heard of the reunion, they thought it was fitting to formally recognize the first team to represent Europe, which will occur between Sunday’s third-place and championship games.

“One lady whose husband played on the team wanted to know if it would be out of place to put the team picture on a bottle of wine for each player since they live near a winery,” Williams said. “It’s become a little more than a reunion.”

They’ve rummaged through attics to retrieve dusty memorabilia to take this weekend, a long overdue gathering. That feeling of being a kid in a candy store will return. They may even have some soft-served ice cream.

Jon Mark Beilue is an AGN Media columnist. He can be reached at jon.beilue@amarillo.com or 806-345-3318. His blog and “Out of the Beilue” video appear on amarillo.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jon markbeilue.

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